On Saturday, September 22nd, I will be demoing Neocolonialism as a finalist at the Boston Festival for Indie Games showcase. If you are attending, you should totally stop by my booth so we can swap secret lentil soup recipes and be best friends.* I will also have a signup sheet for the upcoming beta release.

Give a take a day. As far as I can decipher from last year’s daily planner, September 14th was when I first started talking to my friend Rob (listed in the credits as the Visionary of the project) about what a game about globalization might look like.

I first released the game in the spring and since then thousands of people have played it and hundreds have provided feedback. I want to take the time to thank the astonishingly large amount of people that have provided very generous positive feedback, and all the people who have provided critical but constructive feedback, and all the people who did not provide critical or positive feedback but were still very amusing.

I still don’t know quite what the future holds for Neocolonialism. Ideally, it will be complete in the year, and the final build will be sold for a small amount of dollars. I have for long had ambitions of crafting additional educational video games, and I am already several steps further down that path than I could’ve hoped for last year. Which is awesome.

What a week it has been for Neocolonialism! Thousands of visitors to the Greenlight page, hundreds to this blog, tens of downloads, squillions of comments about the map being upside down. Much thanks to the many people who have commented here and on its Greenlight page. With a little (or maybe more than a little) luck, this project could really become something.

AI opponents! Now, you don’t even need friends to bring the world to financial ruin.

A proper pre-game lobby screen.

A lot of background technical changes

Read the included “Version History” document for a (mostly) complete list of changes.

This release is (as far as I can tell) vastly less buggy than those before it, and much closer to a feature-complete beta. I’ve got sixteen monkeys working out the public Internet problem right now.

On Thursday, August 30th, Steam Greenlight comes out, and I hope to put my project on there then. Neocolonialism on Steam would be a wonderful, wonderful thing, so get ready to vote if you have an account!